Remote logins, remote friends connections, remote messaging, journals, photos, discussion groups, sophisticated node control, ACL and privacy controls and more are all working, and will be refined in the coming releases, along with all new features like one-click server upgrades, search, micro-blogging, and more.

Re: "practical enough that people would actually use it" -- define "people". The fact that you compared Diaspora to Freenet almost says enough about which people will go to the trouble of using it. For better or worse, most people do not care enough about privacy to use Freenet or Diaspora. Folks are pissed off at Facebook, yes, but not because Facebook is overly centralized, rather because Facebook has made dumb decisions re: what to do with all that centralized data. Theoretically, something like Diaspora can solve these problems by decentralizing, but is there the remotest possibility that the majority of Facebook users would move over to it for that theoretical reason? No, not at all. If any significant number of people leave Facebook, it will be for another centralized and easy-to-use service, just one with a slightly stronger-seeming commitment to privacy.

I should expand on that because there is a legitimate concern here. One big problem I had with Facebook is that friends from completely disparate groups can share information about you without your control.

For example, unless you're a completely boring person and disable the ability for people to see your tagged photos and the ability for them to post on their wall, the photos and stories about what happened when you got drunk last night can easily be presented to your boss or whoever else. Maybe you're not comfortable with this.

What I would really like to see in Diaspora is a way to segregate users thoroughly. Facebook let you set different access levels to your wall for different groups of friends -- I'd like you to be able to partition your wall for different types of friends, or even moderate posts and photos before a particular group gets to see them. Thanks to the open source nature and 3rd party applications, I expect that that will be possible.

You fail to understand what free means.
Free =/= In the hands of a few very powerful corporation who will hide it (since it represents a capital competitive advantage over the smaller, less connected companies)
That would actually be the opposite of free.

Secondly Free doesn't really Apply on data, it applies on people. For the same reason what you call information cannot WANT to be "free". People want to access information, that's very different.

Now if you think on a systemic scale : two very strong forces oppose those who want to share the information, which mean to share the power we have on information (i.e. everybody controls its own and shares the amount he wants) and those who want to OWN the information (meaning not free anymore) in order then to monetize it and sell it to those who will pay the most (BigCo) and that would be Facebook and the likes.

Finally I just wanted to underline that you, probably on purpose, mistake information and personal information.
As Tim Berners Lee and others have been advocating for quite a long time, it is critical that we share more DATA, make it more accessible to everyone. That data he was talking about is not personal data, it is anonymous statistical data that should be available to anyone who wants to study it and make something out of it. Our governments for instance sit on piles of data that they are incapable of analysing because they don't have the time or money to do it, but they wont share it for stupid reasons.